ON JUNE 15, 1945, about a month after V-E Day, the Office of the Provost
Marshal General (OPMG) declassified the reeducation program for
prisoners of war. The general public officially learned of the covert American
program to rehabilitate German soldiers in the some two hundred
POW camps throughout the United States. In a series of press releases the
PMG informed a hitherto critical American press that the government
had not, as many feared, shirked its duty. Enemy POWs would return
home well prepared for the new world order, having received the necessary
exposure to American values.

The prisoners, of course, were not caught off-guard by the announcement.
The existence of the program was common knowledge within the
camps. The efforts to disguise its presence had been awkward, perhaps
purposefully so. As for the staff of the Special Projects Division (SPD)
who ran the program, they were quite relieved. The clumsy veil of secrecy
had evoked a mixture of confusion and derision among the prisoners.
Few inmates had accepted the argument that such central projects as Der
Ruf operated without an American guiding hand. Moreover, the SPD's
cautious policy of avoiding any head-on confrontation with National Socialism
merely beclouded the clarity of the American creed as relayed to
the prisoners. Now that Germany had finally fallen, the SPD was absolved
of the need to navigate a circuitous path to the hearts and minds of
the prisoners. The reeducation staff began plotting a new and bolder
course for the program.

A sense of urgency characterized the restructuring of reeducation. War
Department policy called for the departure of all POWs by March 31,
1946. All military personnel involved in the program were anxious to
demonstrate tangible and positive results prior to repatriation. Accordingly,
the SPD set about revising its syllabus, timetable, and objectives.

As a point of departure, the SPD abandoned its effort to influence every
facet of prison life. Instead, the program officers sought to identify the
noncommitted and “moderate” anti-Nazis, expose them to a crash course
in American democracy, inform them of American objectives in occupied
Germany, and send the graduates of this program back to Germany before
the remaining POWs.

Notes for this page

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.comPublication information:
Book title: The Barbed-Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States during World War II.
Contributors: Ron Robin - Author.
Publisher: Princeton University Press.
Place of publication: Princeton, NJ.
Publication year: 1995.
Page number: 127.

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